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Real world example 2

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New Starters Home Page


After the highly successful completion of a project, a development team at CSC received many requests to start new projects for the happy customer. The total amount of new work was larger that the original project and it was broken up in to a number of smaller projects. The development team found itself pulled apart and growing at the same time.
Two critical issues were encountered. First, how to retain and disseminate the development culture and knowledge of the original successful project and second, how to train the large number of new staff who were being recruited, in this case mainly graduates. The solution to both of these issues was found in the department's wiki.
An effort was already underway to capture the newly created department's knowledge in a wiki and it was an easy step to add a 'graduate training' page to the site which listed, in a way relevant to the new recruits, all the wiki pages and references that the graduates had to learn.
One graduate started a few months early and he was used as the 'guinea pig'. He was given the task of following the graduate training procedure that was defined on the graduate training wiki page and then improving it. Being a first draft, it needed a general clean up and there were a number of things the graduate could not understand and so he talked to the relevant people and and updated the training procedure.
By the time the main body of graduates arrived a few months later, the graduate training procedure was well polished. The new graduates were quickly inducted into the department and became productive much more quickly that would be expected without the wiki based training.
Each year, one of the last years graduates will be chosen to update the graduate training plan wiki page for the next years graduates. The content that the graduate training plan refers to is constantly improved as part of the department's standard knowledge management practices.

Key points to learn from this story:
  • Knowledge was sucessfully captured and grown to help future projects succeed like the original project.
  • Giving the new starters some ownership of the process improved the quality and relevance of the content.
  • New starters were introducted to wiki concepts immediately on commencing work. Many of the new starters were already experienced with this type of collaboration and felt comfortable working in this way.
  • The process of maintaining the induction procedure became incremental and continual, so the procedure is never very out of date and always relevant
  • Checking the change history and keeping track of recent changes allows people to monitor changes to critical page.